The history of England, from the earliest times to the Norman Conquest

by Thomas Hodgkin

The conversion of the southern Picts to Christianity is believed to have taken place more than two centuries before the date that we have now reached. Near the close of the fourth century when the Roman empire had already begun to crumble into ruin, St. Ninian, a Briton educated at Rome, filled with veneration for the soldier-saint, Martin of Tours, came to the region between the Roman Wall and the Grampians, preached Christianity with much success to the Picts who dwelt in that country, and built a monastic church dedicated to St. Martin, on one of the promontories of Galloway which project south into the Irish sea. This church, built of stone, and thereby differing from the humbler wooden churches of the period, was called Candida Casa (a name represented in its modern successor Whithern), and it is said to have been still in course of erection when Ninian heard of the death of the holy man in whose name he dedicated his beautiful “white house”. Nearly two centuries passed away. There was much intercourse of various kinds between the dwellers in the Hebrides and their neighbours the Scots of Ireland. The Dalriadic kingdom, Scottish (that is Erse) by race and Christian by religious profession, was set up in Argyll and the adjacent islands; but the Picts north of the Grampians whose relations to Dalriada were generally hostile, remained obstinately heathen. All this was changed by an event which took place about the year 563—the arrival of St. Columba from Ireland. Whatever accretions of superstitious legend may have grown up around the name of this saint, the historic importance of the great apostle of the Picts cannot be denied, and can hardly be over-stated.

Born in Donegal, in the year 521, a scion of the princely clan of the Hy Neill, descended from Irish kings both on his father’s and his mother’s side, the young Irishman in his boyish days showed such zeal in his attendance at church that his baptismal name of Colum was changed to Colum-cille or Columba of the church. He was ordained priest, but the bent of his religious temper like that of most of his Irish contemporaries was all towards the monastic profession. During his early middle life he was busily engaged in founding monasteries, the first in point of date being that of Derry, and the most famous that of Durrow in the diocese of Meath. But in his fortieth year, 561, he became entangled in one of the ever-recurring civil wars of his distressful country. A great battle was fought at Cuildremhne, in Connaught, near the boundary between that province and Ulster. Columba’s kinsfolk, the northern Hy Neill, prevailed and the King of Ireland, commanding the clans of the southern Hy Neill, was defeated. Though his friends’ cause triumphed, the battle appears in some unexplained manner to have injured Columba’s religious position in his native country. He seems to have been excommunicated by some of his brethren, possibly on account of his alleged responsibility for the strife. At any rate he now resolved to quit his country and, perhaps as a penance for his sins, to take up his abode in some place from which he could not even see the shores of his beloved Ireland. Such a place, after some wandering, he found in the then little known island of Hy, famous to after ages under the name of Iona; where, as tradition tells, he ascended a hill which still bears the name of Cul-ri-Erin (back turned to Erin), and when he found that no line of the Irish coast, however dimly seen, could thence be discerned on the horizon, amid all the cluster of surrounding islands, he determined to make that little spot his dwelling-place. Iona is separated from the much larger island of Mull by a channel about one mile broad. It is only three miles long, and from a mile to a mile and a half in breadth; yet in this little space there is considerable variety of scenery; hills, the highest of which attains to an elevation of 320 feet, “retired dells, long reaches of sand on shores indented with quiet bays, little coves between bare and striking rocks, and on the west wild barren cliffs and high rocky islets opposed to the sweep of the Atlantic”.[61] As Bede says: “it is not large but computed as containing five families according to English reckoning”. (The word “families” is rendered “hides” in the English Chronicle, and this is an important passage as showing what were the average dimensions of a “hide of land” in early Saxon times.) The ruins now visible on the island are those of a Benedictine abbey of the thirteenth century. No traces remain of the buildings, probably wooden, raised by St. Columba, but there are many interesting natural features which may be recognised in the nearly contemporary life of the saint written by the ninth abbot of Iona, Adamnan.

The objects which Columba set before himself after his migration to Iona were political as well as religious. His kinsmen, the Scots of Dalriada, were harassed and oppressed by the pagan Picts in the east of the island, whose king, Brude, had in the year 560 inflicted a crushing defeat on the Scottish king, Gabhran. Columba would fain convert the Pictish conqueror to Christianity, and at the same time obtain more generous treatment for his beaten countrymen; and by the magic of his personality he achieved a striking success in both directions. King Brude in 565 embraced Christianity, and relations of peace and friendship were established between him and the man whom, in 574, Columba succeeded in placing on the throne of Dalriada, Aidan, Prince of Strathclyde. The thirty-four years of Columba’s life, after his great migration, were spent in establishing monasteries in the land of the northern Picts, in the Hebrides and in his native Ireland, to which he paid several visits, and where the once excommunicated partisan was now an honoured, almost worshipped guest. These Columban monasteries, “the family of Iona” as they were called, were of a distinctly different type from that of the monasteries of the Benedictine rule. Like all the Irish monastic establishments they partook largely of the tribal character. The tribe gave the land, contributed to the support of the monks, had a right to receive, apparently without special charge, their religious ministrations, and in certain circumstances had also a right to nominate one of its members as abbot, though the first claim upon this coveted office resided in the family of the founder. It was thus that the first nine abbots of Iona were all descended from the same family, the northern Hy Neill, from which St. Columba himself had sprung. This tribal character of the monasteries suited the genius of the Celtic populations, and was one reason of the success of the missionaries in converting them to Christianity. It has been truly said[62] that “these large monasteries, as in their external aspect they appeared to be, were in reality Christian colonies into which converts, after being tonsured, were brought under the name of monks”.

The large part thus played by the monasteries in the work of conversion impressed in its turn a peculiar character on the churches of Ireland and Hebridean Scotland, rendering them more exclusively monastic and less purely episcopal than the churches of Italy and Gaul. This divergence resulted in part from the nature of things, and was due to the differences of place and time in which the conversion of the several countries was respectively effected. The Bishops of Lyons and Vienne, of Toledo and Seville began their work while the Roman Empire was still standing, were to some extent moulded by its form, shared the prosperity and the influence of its great towns and were essentially magnates of cities. Columba, his comrades and his pupils, came into a much ruder and more primitive state of society. The rough tribal rulers whom they converted had scarcely any cities worthy of the name. The new missionaries planted their monasteries in such rural places as promised them the supply of their simple wants, or even only safety from the attacks of a midnight foe—often on an island in a lake or surrounded by the ocean—and there, not so much by eloquent preaching as by mere rightness and simplicity of living, succeeded in converting whole populations to the religion of Christ. The conversions thus obtained seem to have been for the most part more genuine and more durable than those which were first effected in the large cities of the old Roman world and from thence radiated outwards into the country.

It has seemed necessary to emphasise this distinction between the two types of ecclesiastical organisation (the fourth century Gaulish and the sixth century Irish Churches) because the difference reappears in our own history. The Roman mission under Augustine and his successors, and especially under Paulinus in Northumbria, seems to have gone on the old urban and episcopal lines, while the far more successful mission from Iona, with which we have now to deal, was monastic, many-centred and rural. In the year 597, the very year of Augustine’s arrival in England, St. Columba died. He is one of the most vividly seen personalities of the early Middle Ages: a man of somewhat hot temper in youth, softened and controlled in later life, with a stately beauty of feature which seemed to correspond with his princely descent, and with a kind of magnetic power of attracting to himself the devotion of his followers, a lover of animals and beloved by them. One of his natural gifts was an extraordinarily strong and resonant voice which, when he sang the psalms of the church, could be heard distinctly for more than a mile. A great open-air preacher, an organiser and a poet—he eagerly championed the cause of his brother bards before an Irish synod—he might, perhaps, not unfittingly, be called the John Wesley of the sixth century.

In 615, about eighteen years after the death of Columba, when his fellow-tribesman Fergna was ruling, fourth in the series of abbots, at Iona, a party of refugees from the south crossed the little channel and landed on the shore of the island, craving shelter and sanctuary. They were some of the attendants of Ethelfrid, the late King of Bernicia, who had been slain “when the river Idle ran foul with Anglian blood,” and they brought, besides other noble youths, Oswald, that king’s second son, and implored the brethren to protect him from the avenging might of Edwin. There was no shadow of a claim for this young Anglian, son of an obstinate pagan, on the hospitality of the Irish monks, but the request was willingly granted. Oswald and the young nobles his companions were kindly received, were soon baptised, and instructed in the doctrines of Christianity, and growing up to manhood on the sequestered Hebridean isle, probably looked forward to no other sort of life than that which was led by the simple-hearted monks their entertainers.

All this was changed, in 633, by the great and unlooked-for catastrophe of Heathfield. The two Northumbrian kingdoms, united under the strong rule of Ethelfrid and Edwin, fell once more apart. Osric, cousin of Edwin, son of his uncle Elfric, ruled in Deira, and Eanfrid, eldest son of Ethelfrid, in Bernicia. These two young princes, each of whom had made profession of the Christian faith, both apostatised and returned to paganism. Possibly the sordid calculations by which Coifi had justified his renunciation of the faith of his fathers weighed with them now in the opposite scale, and they felt themselves justified in deserting the Christians’ God, who had abandoned their land to the tender mercies of Penda and Cadwallon. But the triumph of paganism was short. Osric, who with inadequate forces besieged Cadwallon while holding the “municipium” of York, was killed and his whole army cut to pieces by a sudden sally of the Welsh king. This happened in the summer of the year which followed the battle of Heathfield, and, apparently in the following autumn, Bernician Eanfrid, coming with twelve chosen warriors to treat of peace with Cadwallon, was treacherously slain by his orders. So full of gloomy memories was this year, 634, that the monkish chroniclers, who afterwards drew up a scheme of Anglian chronology, decided that it should not come into the number of the years, and silently included it in the glorious reign of him who succeeded the apostates.

This successor was Oswald, who came from Iona evidently determined to play the part of a Christian hero-king, and who endured to his life’s end steadfast in that decision. By one bold stroke he delivered his nation, Bernicia, from the Cambrian ravagers. “When he arrived after the death of his brother Eanfrid with a small army, and fortified by the faith of Christ, the wicked general of the Britons with the immense forces which, as he boasted, nothing could resist, was slain by him at the place which is called in the English tongue Denisesburn,’ that is, the stream of Denis.” So runs the first simple statement of Bede as to this important encounter which for ever settled the question whether the Celt or the Teuton was to be supreme in Northern Britain. From Bede himself, as a kind of afterthought, and from Adamnan, the biographer of St. Columba, we get some additional particulars which enable us to see more clearly if not the strategic features of the battle at least what was passing in the minds of the combatants. It seems that the battle itself was fought not at “Denisesburn” but at Heavenfield, a little on the north of the Roman wall, which probably was an important element in the problem that the Anglian king, with his great inferiority of forces, had to solve.[63] The great Roman work, striding across the country in its uncompromising way, here traverses a high moorland which separates the main stream of the Tyne from its northern affluent, and in this portion of its career it is from 700 to 800 feet above the level of the sea. Though none of its stones are here remaining, we can yet trace the high mounds and deep fosses of its companion, the line of fortification on the south, which is known by the name of the vallum. Between these two lines, that of stone and that of earth, ran the Roman road, still probably in Edwin’s day capable of being traversed, notwithstanding 230 years of neglect. Along this road Cadwallon may have marched, and by it he may have encamped for the night, while somewhere, behind either wall or vallum, Oswald may have placed in ambush his father’s veterans. He himself was in a mood of religious and patriotic exaltation. On the day before the battle he had in his sleep a vision of the blessed Columba, whom he had never seen with the eyes of the flesh. The saint’s beautiful face shone with angelic brightness: his figure rose majestic till it seemed to touch the clouds: he spread his mantle over the Anglian camp. Addressing Oswald in the words which Moses spake to Joshua he told him to be strong and of a good courage, for the Lord would be with him. Let him march out on the following night to battle: his foes should be all scattered in flight, and the Welsh king should be delivered into his hands.

Awaking, Oswald assembled his council, told them his dream and received the unanimous promise of the army that if they won the victory they would make profession of the Christian faith. He then caused a large wooden cross to be prepared and a hole to be dug, in which it was firmly planted, he himself holding it erect with both hands while his soldiers filled in the soil. When this was done he cried to the host with a loud voice: “Let us all bend our knees and together call upon God Almighty, the Living and the True, that He in His pity will defend us from our proud and cruel foe: for He knoweth that this is a just war that we have undertaken for the deliverance of our people”. All obeyed his command and prayed to the God of the Christians. That night, just before dawn, they moved out of camp, attacked the probably unsuspecting Britons, and inflicted upon them a crushing defeat. Many of the enemy must have perished on the wide moorland; some who probably fled southwards with Cadwallon, their king, were whelmed in the deep waters of the Tyne. Cadwallon himself met his death (how we know not) on the banks of the little Rowley Burn, some five miles south of the Tyne and ten miles from the field of battle. Such was the event which ruined the British hopes of a reconquest of the island, which confirmed the endangered work of Ethelfrid, ratified the victory of Chester, cut off the Britons of the south from their kinsmen in Strathclyde, and confined the former to that mountainous rectangle of territory which we know as Wales. The son of the slain king, “Cadwallader the Blessed,” perhaps strove for a time to maintain the high, almost imperial pretensions of his father, but his long reign seems to have been on the whole disastrous, and when he died a pilgrim at Rome in the year 681, the Welsh chronicler himself admits that “thenceforth the Britons lost the crown of the kingdom and the Saxons gained it”.[64] The two centuries which followed the battle of Heavenfield are the darkest and dreariest in the history of Wales.

Returning in triumph, as Columba in vision had promised him, Oswald proceeded to his father’s wooden palace at Bamburgh, and from thence, apparently with little difficulty, extended his rule over all Northumbria. In Bernicia he would, of course, as the son of Ethelfrid, find many loyal hearts ready to greet him; and even Deira, now that Edwin and his progeny were off the stage, had possibly a welcome for the man who was not only the deliverer from British oppression, but also on his mother’s side descended from the old line. For it will be remembered that Acha, wife of Ethelfrid, was daughter of Aelle of Deira.